This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 9:10 am and is filed under bikes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Bike vs. Ped on Market Street: Nobody’s Hurt But You Make the Call – Watch the Video and Then Assign the Blame”

And Yellow means caution…what part of caution means run down a pedestrian? You’re always responsible to control your vehicle…how fast was the bike going? Doesn’t seem to be a visibility problem..so was the bicyclist not looking? How hard is it to avoid a pedestrian on an open street with clear visibility? Right of way doesn’t mean you can hit any pedestrian in your way. I would also argue that the pedestrian doesn’t need to monitor multiple sets of lights…if they go on a green and get hit because someone or something else was also allowed to cross their path then they may have an issue with whoever set up the signals. Let’s assume you replace the lights with a traffic cop. Who would be at fault if the cop said ‘proceed with caution’ to the bike and ‘go’ to the pedestrian at the same times?

Under CA law, yellow simply means that a red light is coming soon. The limit on Market, generally, is 25 MPH – the cyclist wasn’t speeding. The cyclist was looking but the ped violated his right of way. I’d say it was pretty easy for the cyclist to avoid the ped. The ped doesn’t seem to understand the CVC. You don’t understand the CVC. But, yes, having the right of way doesn’t mean that the cyclist can aim at the ped and collide on purpose, that’s true. The ped only needs to look at her WALK light PLUS she needs to look to her left for traffic clearing the intersection. She didn’t do that. That’s why she’d be held at fault. There’s no issue with who set up the signals. The ped was in error despite the fairly generous two-second all red phase.

Green doesn’t mean go for peds or bikes or cars. Maybe it does wherever you’re from but not in CA. In CA green means go after letting the intersection clear.